Master director Marco Bellocchio’s latest feature film, Kidnapped is a period drama set in the turbulent times of Italian national unification, or Risorgimento. One night in 1858, soldiers burst into the home of a Jewish Mortara family in Bologna and kidnap their six-year-old son, Edgardo. They claim that a Catholic maid working in the house had secretly baptized the child and that, by law, he was to be raised under Catholic care. This begins a long battle between the family and the Papa Pio IX, the ruler of Rome at the time, to get the child back. Edgardo becomes a political issue between the Jewish community and the Vatican. The director exposes the abuse of power of the papacy at the time, which could divide families and even destroy a person’s character. Marco Bellocchio, the last legend of Italian cinema in the 1960s, poured his directorial genius into Kidnapped, a film about religious intolerance and the inhumanity of power. (SEO Seunghee)